From the #Cloud: Microsoft Announces UK Office 365 Local Datacenters

It’s been a while in the making, but finally today in a blog post here, Microsoft have announce availability of 2 new UK Office 365 datacentres.

For a while now, customers in the UK with concerns over sovereignty of their data have been mumbling about the lack of UK based Cloud capability (from ANY of the major players) and Microsoft are the first to blink to bring this capability to life in the UK.

Like some of the other regions (notably; China), the UK services are being delivered in partnership with a 3rd party although this information doesn’t seem to be part of the current set of announcements – I guess time will tell if the nature of the partnership will be made public.

In terms of customers, the Typhoid Mary (ahem!) is our very own Ministry of Defence who are currently in the process of trialing out the service in preparation for wide-scale migration and roll-out in the coming months.

For sure having the MoD as a Office 365 customer is a coup for Microsoft – they’ve now got both the Western defence superpowers bought-in to Office 365 (the US DoD are underway with the US Air Force being the beach-heading service) so almost any other organisation from any vertical will have any residual fears about the suitability of the Microsoft Cloud wiped out – after all, if it’s good enough to defend the realm then it’s going to be good enough for banks, insurance, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, right?

If you’re curious about how to get an existing Office 365 tenant moved to the UK, Microsoft have a published process for what they call “data move” but at the time of writing, this was not available for request for moving from one of the other European Office 365 datacenters to the UK capability – watch this space for an update.

I’m excited.

The UK is finally on the Cloud map and Microsoft have further proven their commitment to their Cloud business by making the jump into the UK ahead of both Amazon and Google. The country votes to Brexit but Microsoft votes to Brenter! Go Satya!